Written by IOE Events The fifth in our ‘What if…?’ debates series, looking at how best to support the most challenged schools, featured the stellar line-up of the National Schools Commissioner, Sir David Carter, Sam Freedman of Teach First, Head of Passmores Academy (and ‘Educating Essex’) Vic Goddard, and Lucy Heller, Chief Executive of the […]

Written by Natasha Downes, Media Relations Manager, UCL The BBC drama McMafia has been the talk of the moment. So much so, that Security Minister Ben Wallace recently admitted to exploiting the success of the programme to raise public awareness of transnational crime, and announce that oligarchs would have to explain the sources of their […]

The Global Engagement Funds are intended to support UCL academics collaborating with colleagues based in other countries. Last year, they enabled Professor Andrew Stahl of the UCL Slade School of Fine Art to bring several brilliant Thai artists to the UK for a fourth edition of Monologue/Dialogue. Curated by Professor Stahl, Monologue/Dialogue is an exhibition […]

Written by IOE Events Next up in our ‘What if…’ debates series was the matter of the teaching profession: What if… we wanted to transform teaching as a career choice?. To address this question we had union and think tank representatives in the form of Mary Bousted and Jonathan Simons, and international perspectives from Professor […]

Written by Dr Lilian Schofield (UCL Bartlett Development Planning Unit) Contemporary urban studies, especially those in global cities often acknowledge the challenges in city planning and a variety of urban development problems that are associated with rapid urban growth. The city of São Paulo, Brazil, which is one of Latin America’s most developed urban agglomerations, […]

And so began the 2012/13 session of the Chemical and Physical Society. It’s a particularly poignant session for me as it will be the last for many of the current committee (sad-face), but let’s not dwell on the negatives. I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome all of our new undergraduates and postgraduates to this wonderful department! If you have yet to join CPS, don’t miss out! Come along to one of the talks (often not chemistry based to expand our minds) and just ask one of the flustered people serving food and wine if they can sign you up. If you’re one of our new members then I hope the mug is treating you well.

We started off this year’s session with the familiar Fresher’s Pub Crawl. It has to be said that there was an impressive turnout of freshers this year, although at some point towards the end of the night we were separated from them. All we can report is that they were NOT dancing to Northern Soul into the wee hours just off TCR…

We kicked off our series of Tuesday lectures with “The Price of Fish: Science and Long Finance” by Prof. Michael Mainelli, Emeritus Professor at Gresham College London . It became all too evident that not many of us are very clued up when it comes to financial theory, but Prof. Mainelli eased us into the talk with some staggering stats from the fish marketplace. Why is it that the Giant Yellow Croaker will sell for £300,000 per fish in Asia, whereas here in the UK we’ve almost out-fished the North Sea? These polar opposites in fish broking (yes, that is a real thing, Google it) suggest that we really don’t have a good grasp of the true value of fish. But then again, how can we if we don’t know the true value of our money or even if our financial system is working? These questions led on to an ominous video about a (hopefully) fictional program called “Ultrahedge”, which you can watch here.

The lecture was an incredibly interesting insight into a whole world of philosophical debate about finance that most of us would never consider. We are, on the whole, quite content with sitting back and letting the economists et al. deal with the global and local financial systems, but we can see that increasingly more often they are simply not working. ‘Long Finance’, an initiative established by Prof. Mainelli in 2007, sets out to research long-term financial approaches that operate to scientific standards, with a time frame of roughly 100 years. Their ultimate goal is to answer a question poised earlier in this article: “When would we know our financial system is working?”. You can read more about Long Finance here.

Next week we have “Global energy mix in 2050: Scenarios and policies”. Don’t miss it!